video chat

Related Terms

Technology for conducting audio and video interaction in real time between users at disparate locations. Video chats are typically conducted via a computer, tablet or smartphone device (also called videophone chatting), and may involve point-to-point (or one-to-one) interaction, as in the case of FaceTime and Skype, or multipoint (or one-to-many) interaction, as in the typical case of Google Hangouts.

While video chatting is often used interchangeably with the term videoconferencing -- and there is considerable overlap between the two -- in most cases videoconferencing refers to multipoint (3 or more participants) audio and video interaction deployed in a business setting, whereas video chatting most frequently refers to one-to-one video calls made via software apps like Skype, FaceTime, Facebook Video Chat and ooVoo.